The Ghosts of Christmas Past
by Isilien Elenihin
Summary: In Pete's World, Rose Tyler meets someone unexpected.
1. Chapter 1

a/n: Nothing you recognize belongs to me! This is being written for the Bad_Wolf_Rising Christmas ficathon. The prompts I chose were Susan/Jack and a Christmas Reunion.

* * *

Her TARDIS hummed and pulsed and sang and Susan Campbell stroked the console gently. She never thought she'd see a TARDIS again, let alone fly one, but desperate times called for desperate measures. When the Daleks had come knocking on the Citadel doors the Time Lords had called everyone in, even a woman who hardly remembered Gallifrey,. She had spent most of her adult life on Earth, had never even graduated from the Academy (any of them), but she'd still felt the call. David had died years ago, and their children had followed—even Alex. Capricious Time Lord genetics had skipped over their son and he had lived, and died, as a human. She'd been bitter for years after that, angry at her grandfather for leaving her, at David for loving her and leaving her, and at the universe for taking so much from her. Eventually, though, she healed (as much as a wife who has buried her husband, a mother who has buried her children, can heal). There were far more good memories than bad; David and Alex and all of their children had given her a precious gift and she wasn't going to let that go to waste, she wasn't going to make their lives meaningless.

And then _It_ had come, a telepathic cry and call to arms. Even grandfather answered, although that might have had more to do with the current President (an old friend of his, apparently) than any sort of duty he felt towards their people. The Time Lords had ostracized him long before he stole a TARDIS and ran away with her, and although he cleaned up messes for them fairly frequently they continued to decry his methods. Once they went as far as to put him on trial; he managed to escape, though, by getting elected President and then running as fast and as far as he could. Susan had no such tricks at her disposal, which was why she found herself in the midst of the deadliest war she'd ever seen.

A Time War was nothing like a regular war—it was so much worse. Two pinnacle civilizations fought for dominance in the universe and a thousand other worlds were drawn into the battle and desecrated: collateral damage, the council said, but Susan couldn't agree. She didn't even know how old she was, anymore. So many possibilities and tangents were being written and unwritten every day that it was impossible to keep track. The Web of Time was fracturing and it was all she and the other Time Lords could do to keep it from shattering completely. It was a losing battle. Every day they lost more ground and the Daleks gained. There were whispers of resurrecting Rassilon in the hopes that he could chase Davros's death machines back. Susan wasn't sure which was worse. Grandfather had told her stories of Rassilon, of his madness and his genius. There was a fine line between the two, and while he danced between them, the Doctor came out on the right side. Rassilon would not.

Still, she was out of contact for years, possibly decades, or maybe just days, fighting the Daleks in the far corners of the universe. Time twisted and contorted around them and it felt like they had always been fighting, like there had been nothing before this endless war of attrition—and like there could be nothing after. She understood why the Doctor never went back. It was easier to think about life before the War than to go see it, to see how Ian and Barbara had lived after they left the TARDIS. She wanted to imagine that they were happy, that they had lived full lives untouched by the chaos that surged around her.

Susan was wrenched from her thoughts as her TARDIS heaved. Alarms blared around her and a bell sounded from somewhere deep within the ship. She grabbed the monitor and swung it around. 'ERROR,' it read in huge, mauve letters. 'ANOMOLY DETECTED. TIME VORTEX FAILING.' She let loose a string of blistering curses and went to work. The splintering of the Web of Time destabilized the Vortex, sending violent ripples throughout the not-space. It took careful piloting to navigate them, and she thanked whatever deities she still believed in that her TARDIS was new enough to have a single pilot console. She wasn't sure how her grandfather managed to steer his ship with its original six-pilot configuration, but she didn't have the luxury of dancing around the Time Rotor like a madman. The Cloister bell sounded once more, and then the lights flickered—and went out. The vessel heaved and tossed like an old Earth ship on stormy seas and Susan clung desperately to the console. In the Vortex time had swirled like a riptide around them but now, now she was caught in the maelstrom. She tried every trick she knew, she pleaded and cajoled and threatened and desperately tried to get the TARDIS to latch on to something, _anything_.

After sixty eight seconds of hearts-stopping freefall her TARDIS grudgingly materialized, and then the real trouble started. They were in the Void, in the space between worlds, and there was nowhere for the TARDIS to go. Susan jettisoned half of the rooms and rerouted all of her remaining power to the dimensional portal and _barely_ managed to squeeze through a crack in the walls between the worlds. The strain, though, was astronomical. Her ship shook around her, vibrated like a tuning fork and the sterile white paneling on the walls began to crumble. A horrible sound, like metal tearing, echoed through Susan's mind and she knew that her TARDIS was screaming and maybe—was dying. She couldn't stop. If she stopped they'd be caught between the worlds, stuck half in the Void and they would die a slow, painful death.

The console burst into flame. The Time Rotor shattered and she covered her face against the spray of glass shards. Thick black smoke poured from the jagged stump and burned her throat and lungs. Whole panels fell from the wall and crashed down onto the floor around her as she struggled to remain upright and get away from the flames that licked hungrily towards the TARDIS ceiling. Something warm trickled down her hand and she turned her arm over; what looked like hundreds of tiny glass shards were embedded in the skin. Her respiratory bypass engaged and she hoped they were somewhere with an atmosphere, because the bypass could only last so long.

White hot pain flashed through her and she fell, pinned to the floor like a bug in a display case by a thin metal pipe. An iron tang coated her mouth and her tongue and blood oozed up around the pipe and ran down her side to pool beneath her. The edges of her vision blurred and she found herself remembering the strangest things: the way David loved chocolate milkshakes, the way the light glistened off the silver leaves of Gallifrey's trees when the suns hit them just right, the safety she felt when her grandfather was with her. With the last of her strength she gripped the pipe with hands made slippery by her own blood and _pulled_. It came free and she released it with a gurgling sigh. And then a strange singing filled her mind and golden fire filled her vision. It was painful, regenerating. Like dying, except there was no tunnel and no white light, just the fire of rebirth and the tingle of new nerves growing where old ones had died. Her bones shifted, reformed, and her skin molded itself to the new infrastructure, over new muscles and veins and brand new, fixed-up hearts. If only her pain could melt away so easily, but the core of her, the experiences and ideas that remained her essential self remained.

The fire faded and she was disoriented for a few seconds, just long enough to get to her knees before the wall behind her collapsed and she fell forward onto her face, pinned beneath the rubble. Ashes coated her tongue and her lips and she spat. She had a brand new body practically _humming_ with energy, but she couldn't use it because she was trapped. Desperately Susan clawed at the floor with her hands but there was nothing she could grab ahold of, just more rubble. A strange lassitude stole over her slowly and her lungs burned—her respiratory bypass was reaching its limit. Blackness crowded the edges of her vision and she let her arms fall. She wasn't yet out of her regeneration cycle. When she died, it would be final. Vague regrets took shape in the fog that clouded her mind. She wanted to see her grandfather. She wanted to feel the suns' light on her face and the wind against her skin. She wanted to dance in the rain. She wanted to laugh again.

A crash and then a burst of cold air roused her from the half-sleep she had fallen into. A masked figure dressed all in black stood over her. Susan tried to speak, but she could only cough. Strong hands seized her arms and _pulled_ and then she was free of the rubble. Blood trickled down her legs and what felt like a hundred little cuts stung but she nearly sobbed with relief. She was _free_. The same arms half carried her through the door, where other black clad figures waited. Other arms supported her and her savior peeled away the mask with a gloved hand. Susan had the impression of golden hair and deep brown eyes and a woman's voice—and then her body betrayed her and the world faded into blackness.

* * *

She woke gradually. Tendrils of a dream clung to her mind and she forced them away sluggishly. She was warm, nearly uncomfortably so, and apparently underground. There was a damp chill in the air and a stillness that spoke of enclosed spaces. The walls and floor vibrated slightly—generators, although she couldn't determine the type from the sonic frequencies. There was another sound, an annoying, high-pitched beeping that was synced up to her heartsbeat and probably corresponded to the two metal disks she could feel taped to her chest. Susan shifted and something pinched on her hand: an IV. For a moment she panicked, but a quick internal check revealed that she was basically healthy, besides a bit of regeneration sickness and a strain on her lungs. The abrasions she'd suffered in her TARDIS (don't think about it don't think about it don't think about the silence in her head) had healed nicely. Whoever inserted the IV either knew a great deal about Gallifreyan physiology or was extremely lucky. She wasn't sure which possibility was more disconcerting. She wasn't on Gallifrey, she knew that immediately. The nearly overwhelming chorus of her people's minds was absent. Actually, she couldn't hear anything in her head, anything at all. She'd been so focused on ignoring the gaping wound that was the loss of her TARDIS that she'd overlooked the silence.

It hit her with the force of a freight train. For a time she couldn't think, couldn't move, couldn't breathe. She'd never been alone in her life, not like this, not alone in her head. The Time Lords were a stuffy, immobile, infuriating lot—but they were always _there_. Now—there was nothing.

"I know you're awake, so you might as well stop pretending." A woman's voice drifted over from her left.

Susan disengaged her respiratory bypass and took a deep breath, forcing her heartsbeat to remain normal. Panicking would not get her answers, after all. "It was risky," she responded scathingly, "hooking an alien up to an IV designed for a human. Or are your people not technologically advanced enough to differentiate between humans and humanoid aliens? Although to be fair," she continued, "we came first."

The woman chuckled. "I may not be able to perform surgery, but a basic IV is well within my capabilities. Careful," she cautioned as Susan attempted to sit up.

"I am quite well, thank you." Susan frowned. She had a bit of an accent this time, sounded like she was from London, as did her—captor? Savior? Babysitter? The woman was young, late twenties, early thirties at most. Her long, straight blonde hair was pulled back from her face and her dark brown eyes were warm and knowing. Her lips were full and lightly painted and curved up slightly, but there were faint lines at their corners, and around her eyes, that spoke of hardship and pain. Her face was thinner than her bone structure indicated was healthy and there was an air of weariness about her that was unusual in one so young.

Susan glanced around the room; it was bare except for the cot she was lying in and the chair which the woman occupied. It was small, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were smooth concrete. A door was set into the wall opposite the bed; it was thick steel with a narrow window at head height.

"Am I a prisoner, then?" Susan asked coldly. "We are in a cell, after all."

The woman shrugged. "If you like. It's not strictly true but you have just regenerated, so I wouldn't recommend running away—and you wouldn't get very far, even if you did. I'm sorry about the accommodations, but we're running out of space to put people. Still, they're decent cells, and clean. I'd give them at least a seven out of ten."

One eyebrow rocketed up. "Had much experience with prisons?"

The woman grinned. "Oh, a fair amount. I have this friend, he can't seem to avoid them." She held out a white ceramic mug that held some sort of hot liquid. "Here, drink this. It will help with the regeneration sickness."

Susan brushed her hair—longer this time, and brown, and far curlier than it had ever been—back behind her ear and took the steaming mug cautiously. "What is it?" she asked and sniffed it.

"Tea," the woman answered, amusement plain on her face and in her voice. "Just tea, I promise."

Susan took a slow sip, her eyes still on the woman. She catalogued the chemicals (useful talent, having hyper-sensitive taste) and found that it was tea—just tea, hot and sweet and strong. Rather sweeter than she found she liked, in fact, but still decent. Plenty of tannins and free radicals to help quell the regeneration sickness and get her back on her feet.

"Now." The humor drained out of the woman's voice like water through a sieve. She straightened in her chair and fixed Susan with a look that could have melted steel. "I'd like you to tell me what a Time Lord is doing in this universe as there _are not_ and _have never been_ Time Lords here, and how you came through—seeing as I have it on very good authority that the walls between the worlds have closed."

Susan's grip on the mug tightened until her knuckles were white. "The Time War," she replied after a long moment of strained silence. "The Vortex is unstable. Gallifrey has more important things to worry about than a single TARDIS caught in a parallel world."

"Oh." There was something in the woman's eyes that Susan didn't like. She'd seen it before, often enough, when her grandfather had terrible news. She straightened.

"'Gallifrey,'" the woman murmured, half to herself. "He never told me the name, not once."

"What is it?" Susan asked. "Please, tell me what you know!" For a moment the woman looked like she would refuse, but then she sighed. "I'm sorry," she said eventually. "I'm so, so sorry—but it's gone."

Susan blinked. "What?" The woman remained silent, but her eyes carried oceans of sorrow. With a great deal of effort Susan stretched out her hand and caught the woman's arm. "What are you talking about?" she demanded.

"Gallifrey. The Time Lords. It's gone. It's all gone. There was a war—and you lost."

Susan sat back, her eyes wide and staring. It was impossible, completely and totally impossible. The Daleks were formidable, but _gone_? How could Gallifrey be _gone_? It all made sense now, the silence she felt, the way the Earth felt wrong beneath them. Not even a parallel universe could cut her connection to Gallifrey and she'd spent centuries with the Earth spinning below her. "How?" she managed to choke out. Tears burned in her eyes and at the back of her throat. Her whole family was gone. Everyone she loved—everyone she loved was _dead_. She was an orphan, well and truly, in a strange and hostile universe without even her TARDIS for companionship and comfort.

The woman shook her head. "I don't know, I'm sorry. He hardly ever spoke of it. I didn't even know what your planet was called."

With difficulty, Susan reigned in the chaos that threatened to overwhelm her. Later, there would be time to fall apart later. "Right." Her voice was flat and angry and there was something hot building in her gut—rage and determination. It was easier to be angry than to process what she'd been told. "Now it's my turn for answers. Let's start with who you are and what this place is. Oh, and how you know so much about my people."

"My name is Rose Tyler," the woman told her. There was understanding in her warm brown eyes, and something like sympathy. "Right now we're in what's left of Torchwood 3 in Cardiff, Wales, Earth—Pete's World. And I know about Time Lords because I traveled with one."

"You said there aren't any Time Lords here," Susan reminded her.

Rose smiled. "Never said I traveled _here_, did I?"

A hope so fragile that Susan almost couldn't bring herself to ask bloomed within her chest. If someone else was out there, anyone, there was a chance that she could leave this place, a chance she could get back. With one Time Lord on one side of the divide it would be impossible, but with two…"Who? Who was it?"

Rose looked away. Her lips pulled into a thin line across her face and Susan read pain in the set of her shoulders and the tightness around her eyes. "He was called 'the Doctor.' I never got his proper name, if he even had one. Just—the Doctor."

Susan opened her mouth to say—something, but the words wouldn't come. Her grandfather was _alive_! She felt like dancing. Well, not really. Her legs still ached and her head felt fuzzy and there was a bone deep weariness that made any sort of significant movement unattractive, but _she was not alone_.

"He told me no one else survived," Rose continued, heedless of Susan's incredulity. "I asked, but he said he could feel his people, and it felt empty. He was the last of his kind, traveling alone because there was no one left—no one but me." A smile stole across her face, small and broken.

Oh. Susan blinked. Well, that was—that was interesting. He'd always been a bit of a rebel, her grandfather, always disdained the superiority complex Time Lords as a whole seemed to have. Several times he'd been accused of inappropriately fraternizing with 'lesser species,' but there was a line he refused to cross. She'd seen it with Sarah Jane and with Tegan and a handful of other companions. But in the aftermath of the Time War, if he believed himself to be alone in the universe, the sole survivor—would he have crossed that line?

Later, she reminded herself. There would be time for all of this later. If her grandfather was alive, if he was out in their original universe, she could get back to him. Susan tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed, but the smallest movement took an incredible effort, and she ended up only shifting herself slightly.

"Take it easy," Rose advised. "You're not well."

"You don't understand." Susan shook her head and tried again, but she moved even less, and her arms shook. "Grandfather is _alive_, I have to—I have to get back."

"Grandfather?" Rose's eyes were huge. "What, seriously? I mean—children, he said, not grandchildren."

Susan paused. "Hang on. If you knew my grandfather, if you traveled with him—why are you here?"

Rose looked down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap. Her posture was rigid, her movements sharp and controlled. "There was a war." Her voice was soft, so soft that Susan almost didn't hear it. "Not the Time War, another war, another battle. And we won, but there was a price." She chuckled bitterly. "There's always a price. I was trapped here and the walls closed. There's no way back. And now I'm trapped in the wrong universe, and there isn't even an Earth left to defend." Rose looked like she was going to say more, but a knock at the door interrupted her. She stood. "You'll want to rest. You're going to need it."

"Time Lords don't need nearly as much sleep as humans do," Susan tried to argue, but she was shaking just from the effort of sitting up, and she could tell that Rose knew. With a sigh she gave in to her body's urgings and slid back down on the bed. A murmur of voices, Rose's and a man's, washed over her before sleep claimed her.

* * *

_Susan opens her eyes slowly. The twin suns of Gallifrey are high in the sky and the wind blows down from the mountains and carries with it the sound of a thousand silver leaves chiming together. Rolling hills covered with tall red grass undulate like an endless, scarlet ocean. A flutterby dances in the wind and she smiles. It's good to be home. The white stone of the parapet is warm beneath her and a book is by her side: 'The Time Machine,' by H.G. Wells. It is one of grandfather's favorites, and he's determined to meet the genius who could envision time travel in such a backwards time. _

_ "Susan? What are you doing, child?" _

_A smile breaks over her face and she scrambles to her feet. "Grandfather!" _

_He stands before her as she first knew him, old and seemingly frail, with neatly brushed white hair and piercing blue eyes. As always he spurns the traditional robes which denote his status as a Time Lord, the Academy from which he graduated, and his position. He prefers a suit from Earth, of all places. His hands clutch at the lapels of his suit, as they always do when he is angry or disappointed. "Grandfather?" she asks again, and takes a hesitant step forward only to find that something holds her legs immobile. _

"_Where were you, Susan?" he asks her, and there is accusation and weariness in his voice. "I searched for you, I searched the whole universe. I _needed_ you, Susan, and you weren't there." Something flickers red-orange at his feet—and then her grandfather bursts into flame._

"_No!" she screams and desperately tries to reach him—but it's like walking through tar. By the time she stands where he was, only ash remains. Susan falls to her knees beside the pile—so small for what had been a person—and tries to gather it together, but it slips through the space between her fingers. Shadows fall over her, and when she raises her eyes seven figures stand in a circle around her. "Please!" she begs and tears run down her cheeks. "Please, I tried, grandfather! I tried!" _

_The seven men—her grandfather, all of them—say nothing, but the accusation in their eyes cut into her like knives. The stone disappears, and the suns, and the red grass, and she is falling through a blackness so deep that nothing can escape it—not even the sound of her screams. _

* * *

Susan knew she wasn't alone before she opened her eyes. She was a Time Lord, after all, and her superior brain had already catalogued the faint, floral smell of Rose's soap, the light sounds of her breathing, and the faint brush of her unshielded thoughts against Susan's own barriers. The bits of metal were gone from her chest, along with the pinching IV needle and the annoying beep of the heart monitor. She judged it to be about five hours later, which was an impressive length for a Time Lord to remain asleep but the fog was gone from her mind and her limbs fairly thrummed with energy. Her lungs were better too; a quick internal scan determined that her body was once again operating at full capacity. She sat up and her new hair—long and brown and curly—promptly covered her face. Susan huffed and pushed it behind her ears. Perhaps she would cut it—years spent as a soldier left her with a preference for functional, practical things. Long hair was troublesome and time consuming, no matter how fetching it appeared. She swung her legs over the side of the cot and stood; they were a bit wobbly, but really just needed breaking-in.

Rose was sitting in the lone chair, watching. But for the book which sat closed on her lap Susan would have sworn she hadn't moved. "Feeling better?" she asked.

"Fit as a fiddle," Susan confirmed, and then paused. "That is the correct idiom, yes?"

"Yeah," Rose confirmed with a half-smile. "Feel like a bit of a stroll? I meant what I said, earlier. You're not a prisoner, but we had to be sure you weren't an ax murderer or sommat like that."

Susan stretched her arms high above her head and then cracked her neck. "Lead on."

* * *

Rose led her down twisting, cement hallways, past dozens of other rooms just like the one Susan occupied. Most of them held multiple occupants with their few possessions. It was like walking through a refugee camp, in some ways. The only things she saw were things that could be easily carried; there was none of the excess she was used to despite the apparently higher level of technology as demonstrated by the constant vibrating hum of the generators. They must have been _massive_ to generate enough power to heat a complex so far underground, and so large as it apparently was.

Rose pointed out the hydroponics lab, where most of their food was grown, the armory (Susan wrinkled her nose—weapons still left a bad taste in her mouth), and the workshop, where the tech squad worked to keep the facility running and hopefully salvage some of the infrastructure that was left behind.

"What is this place?" Susan asked as they stood on a catwalk and watched children as young as five and as old as twelve sorting machine parts, sweeping floors, repairing ripped or worn garments, and fetching supplies for various adults below them.

"It used to be Torchwood three," Rose replied. Her confusion must have been obvious, because Rose continued. "The Royal Torchwood Institute was founded in 1869 by Queen Victoria, to protect the British Empire from alien threats. She was attacked by a werewolf, and in our original universe the Doctor 'n I saved her." She huffed in wry irritation. "No good deed goes unpunished. No Time Lords here, but she managed to get away, and she formed the institute just the same. It's why I'm here: in our original universe Torchwood found a weak spot between the two, and they couldn't just leave it alone, no, they fired a particle beam at it, made it bigger. An' on this side there were cybermen tryin' to get through, and right in the middle, hidden in the Void, was a Dalek ship. The ship went through and the cybermen infiltrated Torchwood One in the other universe and they forced the hole wide open." Her fingers tightened around the railing until her knuckles were white. "We closed the hole—but I was sucked through. If Pete hadn't caught me I would have ended up in the Void."

"Pete?" Susan asked.

Rose swallowed. "An alternate version of my dad. My mum'd already gone through; my real dad died when I was a baby and it was a chance for her to be with him again. He—died. They both did, and my little brother."

Susan laid a hand on her arm. "I'm sorry. But look at what you've done. This is—this is _brilliant_."

She laughed. Susan blinked. "What?"

"Sorry." One corner of her mouth tugs upwards into a wistful smile. "You sounded just like him there. He was always nattering on about how 'brilliant' things were. Bananas, usually." She shook her head, amusement plain on her face and in her voice. "I don't know where his banana fixation came from, but it was unhealthy how much he loved them."

"My history is perfect," Susan said after several long moments. "And I don't remember the Earth being anything like this, not in the 21st century. What happened?"

"Not our Earth," Rose reminded her. "There was this huge meteorite that hit in the Slavic Republic—Russia. We tried to stop it, but it was too massive. Scientists say it's like when the dinosaurs went extinct: the meteor threw up all this dust into the atmosphere…"

"Triggering an ice-age," Susan finished. "Causing a chain reaction of extinction and starvation—disaster on a planetary scale."

"Yeah." She kept her eyes on the children below. "There aren't many of us left. Food is scarce, an' we're closer to the poles. Down near the equator it's better, I hear, but there's no way to get there. We can't walk—one of the downsides of living on an island—and all the ships that are seaworthy are gone. An' even if they weren't, who would sail them?"

"You've got hydroponics," Susan pointed out.

Rose shook her head. "It's not enough. Torchwood three funnels energy from the rift that runs through Cardiff, but the converters were damaged and they can barely keep up."

Susan straightened. "Show me."

* * *

She ran her hand over the thick wires that hung down from the ceiling and eyed the rift converters above. The external damage was minimal and appeared to be mostly to the casings, but the internal damage was the tricky part. A power surge had melted a few key circuits and until those were replaced the converters would run at half power at best. Rose introduced her to Toshiko Sato, the head of the tech squad (all four of them) and the woman responsible for patching the converters up as they were. It was brilliant work, for a human in the 21st century, but Susan was a Time Lord and she'd been doing this sort of circuit work since she was a mere 52 years old.

"I can fix this," she told the women. Rose grinned and Toshiko's eyes widened.

"Really?" the petite Asian woman asked.

Susan smiled. "Really. But—I have one condition." Rose gestured for her to continue. "If I do this for you—then I need you to give me space to work and access to your tools for my own project."

"Which is?" Rose prompted.

Susan cleared her throat. "A trans-dimensional transport engine." Rose opened her mouth to reply but Susan held up a hand. "Hear me out. With one Time Lord on one side of the Void it would be impossible to travel between the worlds without destabilizing both worlds to a degree that would be unconscionable. But with one on each side the chances of travel between are far more likely. My TARDIS," her voice broke. "My TARDIS is dead, but there are parts which are still intact, parts which I can use to build a device that will allow me to get back to our original universe. Help me do that, and I will show you how you can live quite comfortably until the ice age passes."

"Take me with you," Rose replied without hesitation.

Susan blinked. "The stress of two passengers will reduce the accuracy, and travel without a capsule is dangerous. I can't promise that you will make it through the trip—intact."

"I've traveled by jumper, an' it can't be worse than that," she shot back. "Take me with you, or no deal."

"Rose!" Toshiko protested.

"Deal." Susan held out her hand, and Rose shook it.

"Deal," she agreed. "Now, let's get you back to your TARDIS."


	2. Chapter 2

a/n: Nothing you recognize belongs to me! And in this chapter we touch on my deep and abiding crush on W.B. Yeats once again. I used lines from "When you are Old."

* * *

Rose handed Susan a thick black parka. "I know all about 'superior Time Lord physiology,'" she said as Susan opened her mouth to object. "And I know for a fact that you can still get frostbite. Take the coat, or stay here."

They were standing in a small room off of the main cement tunnel. Torchwood 3 was built like a maze, but Susan was confident that she could find her way around perfectly. The body of a Time Lord was incredibly efficient, including the brain. Humans only used approximately ten percent of their neural capability, but she used all of it. She was also fairly certain that she could take Rose in a fight, if she absolutely needed to, but that tended to put a damper on relations. "Fine," she grumbled, and pulled the ungainly coat on. "But I'm sure it looks ridiculous."

Rose raised an eyebrow. "It's a great many degrees below freezing out there. Ridiculous or not, your limbs will thank you."

"Goin' somewhere?" A young black man stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. His face was impassive but his posture was tense and he watched Susan like a hawk. "Tosh found me, said you're going back to the ship."

"Mickey." Rose acknowledged him with a nod and a smile. "This is Susan."

"I gathered," he said dryly and held his hand out. "Mickey Smith at your service."

Susan shook it. His grip was firm and steady and he was studying her with a great deal of intensity. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Smith."

Mickey laughed. "She's a sight more polite than the Doctor ever was," he told Rose.

He had a nice smile, Susan noted, although the beard was a bit off-putting. She'd never been fond of facial hair. She smiled in response. "Grandfather can be a bit—brusque."

He blinked. "Grandfather?"

"We'll talk about that later," Rose broke in. "Susan and I are going back to her TARDIS."

"It's nearly nightfall." Mickey crossed his arms again and shook his head. "You can't, Rose. The temperature's dropping wicked fast."

Rose pulled Mickey out into the hall. Susan remained where she was more out of courtesy than anything. She'd seen the look in the other woman's eyes before and she knew what it meant: nothing short of a miracle was going to get between Rose Tyler and what she wanted.

Mickey and Rose returned and as Susan predicted, the other woman was undeterred. Mickey grumbled something about 'stubborn women' and 'bloody aliens' but he also pulled out one of the thick jackets. "If you're set on getting frostbite," he told them, "you might as well have someone with a bit of sense along."

* * *

The last time Susan had been outside she'd also been unconscious and in the grips of regeneration sickness. Her memory of how she came to Torchwood three was fuzzy at best, and there were large chunks of time she couldn't describe at all. She was certain that she would have remembered the cold that stole her breath away for a moment—but she didn't. Mickey was right; the sun was low on the horizon and if it was this cold during the day it must be brutal at night.

"We have to move quickly," Rose reminded them. "Hypothermia is nasty and frostbite is worse."

"How long has it been like this?" Susan asked as they set off towards the center of what used to be Cardiff city.

"Ten years since the meteor hit," Rose replied. "It's gotten worse every year. We used to be able to grow food outside, but that stopped two years ago. It was sheer luck that Torchwood had been experimenting with hydroponics."

Walking through snow was more difficult than she remembered, and she was short this go 'round. It came up past her knees and she felt like she was walking through molasses. "What about the snow?"

Mickey grunted. "This is nothin'. When the deep cold sets in we get drifts twenty feet high in some places, and it gets near as hard as ice." He glanced down at what looked like a large watchface on a thick strap around his wrist. "We've got about an hour before it gets deadly, an' I'd like to be back inside by then so let's hurry up, right?"

Susan nodded. "Right."

* * *

Susan's TARDIS sat in the exact center of the city. The Chameleon circuit, like everything else on the once-magnificent time ship was dead and for the first time they could see the ship as she truly was. Rose had always known the ship was alive; it was one of the first things the Doctor told her when she decided to travel with him, but the TARDIS had always appeared so _mechanical_ apart from the coral walls and organic structure of the interior. She hadn't understood that all the wires and levers and buttons, even the outside appearance of the ship, had been designed to allow others to interact with the living core of the TARDIS. Outwardly, the ship looked very much like a stone, but no stone the Earth (either of them, _any_ of them) could have produced. Brilliant swirls of color danced and shifted with the rays of the sun and they formed patterns that Rose recognized: she'd seen them for years on the sticky notes that invariably clung to the monitor on the TARDIS console. There was a structure too, one that reminded her of coral but not anything she'd seen (on or off of Earth). The angles were wrong, like an M.C. Escher painting, and although she tried to follow them with her eyes she invariably lost the trail. The overall effect was of something undeniably alien.

Susan paused in front of her ship and rested a hand on its finely textured surface. There was something off about it, Rose realized. The presence she had always noticed around the Doctor's ship was gone. It was—empty. She had believed for a moment that Susan had been exaggerating, that the Time Lord's TARDIS would be fine, but now she knew: it was dead. Well and truly dead. However they were getting home, it wasn't in the TARDIS.

"We'll wait here," Rose told Susan.

The other woman nodded. Somehow she managed to find a door, although Mickey and Rose saw no trace of one, and slipped inside the fallen time ship.

"So," Mickey said after a long moment of silence. "It's true, then. You're going."

Rose watched their breaths turn to ice crystals in the air. "Yeah."

"Tosh told me." He laughed, half-heartedly. "I didn't believe her."

"I have to, Mick." Rose wrapped her arms around herself. "If there's a chance, I have to take it."

"What about us? What about _this_?" He threw out his arms to encompass all of Cardiff. "What about the people who depend on you Rose? What are you going to say to them?"

"That I've got the man for the job."

He blinked. "What? Who?" She cocked an eyebrow at him. "_Me?_"

"You don't need me anymore, Mickey," she said gently. "You haven't for a long time. Everyone here respects you; they'll listen if you give the orders. Mum's gone, and Pete, an' even Tony—you're the only thing anchoring me to this universe."

"Yeah," Mickey replied. "They're gone. You're all I got left, Rose."

She shook her head. "You've made a home here, Mickey. Look at you." A small smile curved her lips. "You're not a kid from the estate anymore. You're a man now, an' you've got the beard to prove it. You did just fine for three years without me."

He pulled her into a hug and she went willingly. "You find him," Mickey ordered as she wrapped her arms around him. "Find the Doctor, Rose, an' give 'im hell for letting you go."

"I will." She smiled at him but her eyes were bright with tears. "Take care of yourself, and be happy, Mick. You deserve it."

* * *

Susan fought the urge to retch. The air inside her TARDIS was thick with smoke. The taste of ash and fire coated her tongue and broken glass and shards of coral crunched beneath her heavy boots. The console was a burned-out stump in the center of the destroyed control room. She ran her hands over the twisted levers and blackened switches. Deep inside her mind the fractured link to Gallifrey screamed with all the anguish of a lost child. She was alone, without even the comfort of her TARDIS.

Most Time Lords used TARDIS like humans used cars: a convenient method of transportation and nothing more, but Susan had grown up with her grandfather and with the knowledge that flying a TARDIS was a joint effort. If the TARDIS didn't wish to go somewhere, no power on or off of Earth could compel her. Even Susan's own TARDIS, although it was young and lacked the eons of experience her grandfather's ship had, possessed its own personality. They had been close, almost as close as she and David had been though the nature of the relationship differed in the extreme. Her TARDIS had saved her life so many times, and Susan tried to return the favor. The ship could have abandoned her, could have jettisoned all of the rooms to give her enough power to break free of the Void—but that would have killed her pilot, and so the ship chose instead to sacrifice her life in order to save Susan.

It was an act that precious few Time Lords would have been able to understand. Susan laid a hand on the warped and twisted Time Rotor and said a silent farewell. A macabre horror made her stomach clench as she knelt to unfasten the maintenance panel beneath the console. Using the remains of what had become her closest companion in the chaos and madness of the Time War like it was some sort of machine, only worth the parts it was made of felt _wrong_, but there was no other way.

She found her toolbox in its customary place, latched onto the column of the console. Susan took a deep breath, pressed her lips together into a thin line, and went to work.

* * *

Nearly twenty minutes passed before the door to the dead TARDIS opened again and Susan stepped out into the frigid twilight. She looked like the Doctor did after Van Statten's bunker, like nothing would ever be right, not ever again. There was a weight behind the other woman's eyes that was so familiar that Rose felt her stomach clench in sympathy and an alien cast to her features that called to mind ice blue eyes and grief strong enough to burn stars. The Time Lord pulled a thick cardboard box out and shut the door behind her.

"We can go now." Susan's voice was rough but Rose and Mickey new better than to comment on it. "I have what we need."

Rose laid a hand on the other woman's arm for a brief moment, and then they turned in the direction of Torchwood three. Susan's shoulders were hunched but her spine was ramrod straight, and she did not look back.

* * *

Susan threw herself into fixing the rift converters with a vengeance. She confiscated the tech squad (all four of them, and Tosh) for three days. They were dubious at first, when Rose told them they'd be assisting an alien, but after the first day they believed. Susan ate little and slept less, and there was a desperation to her movements that Rose knew well. It was easier, sometimes, to push the pain away than to deal with it, to pile more work and refuse to sleep until exhaustion overcame her, to run as fast as she could from any memory of the Doctor and the life she'd had before Torchwood and Canary Wharf.

Rose also knew how it would end. She'd seen it before, with the Doctor, with herself. The past cannot be outrun; you carry it with you, wherever you go. She tried, oh she tried when she first landed in this strange, not-quite-right universe. She ran and she worked and it took a mental breakdown to get her to stop, to face up to the truth of the matter: she was stuck here, and the Doctor wasn't coming for her. Susan was a Time Lord and she was more like her grandfather than Rose believed she knew. The Doctor was always running. Rose had seen it catch up to him, though, in a bunker in Utah, on a space station thousands of years in the future, in the heart of an agency designed to capture and exploit him—and on an impossible planet in orbit around a black hole. He couldn't run, then, couldn't get away from the possibility that he'd be trapped in one timeline, maybe on one planet, for the rest of her life.

She wasn't sure how long it would take Susan to reach the point of no return, when the reality of the situation sank in and the universe fractured around her, but she'd been through it before, and sometimes the best medicine was someone who understood. Mickey had, just a bit, and having someone she could talk to had made Rose's life so much easier. She couldn't do much, but she could listen.

After noon on the third day Susan declared the job complete, and the rift converters were pushed to maximum. The ever-present hum intensified, the lights flickered, the whole building seemed to hold its breath—and then the power fluctuations stabilized.

"We're good!" Tosh exclaimed from her perch on the catwalk, surrounded by computer screens. "The rift is stable, the output is stable—and there's a 200% increase in power!"

Someone clapped. Someone else cheered. And then the dam burst and shouts and cries and tears and laughter filled the room to its high, vaulted ceiling. People were dancing, and hugging, and spinning in circles. A guitar appeared in the hands of a serious-faced young man and a ginger girl with a brilliant smile pulled out a flute and soon there was an impromptu party happening in the common room. Susan remained on the outskirts, watching children weave between dancing adults. A hand on her shoulder drew her out of her reverie.

"You did good," Rose told her. The other woman's eyes were dark and bright and the laugh lines her wide smile brought out only made her more lovely. Susan could understand how her grandfather could fall in love with such a woman. She'd known the girl for a day, and she couldn't deny that there was a magnetism about her. "Look at them," Rose continued, and turned her eyes back to her people. "You've given them hope." Her hand tightened, and then released. "That's a precious thing, hope."

Susan smiled. "Yeah," she said softly. "It is."

* * *

Tinkering was always grandfather's realm. At first it was a necessity; the TARDIS was a museum piece when he stole her, after all. She hadn't been used in centuries, maybe even millennia and she barely made it into the Vortex. He'd grumbled at first (he grumbled about _everything_) but Susan noticed a rapport form between the cantankerous Time Lord and the tempestuous ship that seemed to grow the longer he spent splicing wires and reconnecting old circuits. She had asked him about it once, but he's simply told her that it couldn't be explained, that she would understand when she had her own TARDIS.

She had. It was as close to talking as a TARDIS could get; something about their basic construction prevented any sort of real speech. There was the bond, of course, if the TARDIS in question deigned to communicate telepathically, but there was something physically satisfying in performing maintenance. Susan knew every inch of her ship like she knew herself.

Well. Perhaps not anymore. She was still getting used to being short and the inside of her mouth _still_ felt funny (it was the little things that kept plucking at her—new teeth and different tastebuds and a strange accent) and she had absolutely _no_ idea what to do with all the hair she had this time around. Cutting it didn't seem right, somehow, so she settled for pulling it back into a bun to get it out of her face. Building a pandimensional transport engine was delicate and occasionally explosive work, and she had no desire to end up suddenly bald (and the smell of burning hair always made her nauseous).

Rose visited sometimes. As Commander she had duties, of course: she mediated disputes, oversaw plans for expansion, heard grievances, and directed the teams that combed the city for survivors. She ran the base with a light, if firm, hand and the arrangement seemed to work well. Mickey, as Rose said, was her second in command. He brought important matters to her attention but seemed to handle most of the daily minutia of organizing and caring for one hundred and seventeen people. Tosh was in charge of tech and leader of a small group of computer savvy individuals. She supervised the hydroponic gardens that generated most of the camp's food supply. Gwen and Rhys Williams took care of supplies and personnel. She was familiar with them in passing, but Rose seemed to enjoy helping Susan work.

At first their conversation only extended to which tool Susan needed and where Rose should put her hands, but after an hour of easy silence between them, Rose started to speak. She told Susan about the Powell Estate, about working for Henric's and the first time she met the Doctor, when he saved her from what she thought was a prank and then blew up her job. There was a light in the other woman's eyes and a fond affection in her voice that was infectious, and Susan found herself caught up in the tale. When Rose mentioned that she refused the Doctor's offer to travel with him Susan very nearly objected, but the revelation that her grandfather—the man who didn't even _want_ Ian and Barbara along and only brought them because they'd seen the TARDIS and he couldn't afford to have them mucking with timelines—that man asked Rose to travel with him _twice_. He came back. It was strange, hearing about the man who was-but-wasn't the man she knew. Rose's stories revealed a man tormented by guilt, a man who was desperately trying to make up for the blood on his hands, a man who still managed to find joy in the simplest places and who persevered despite the vast odds against him, in a universe that was uncaring at best, and hostile at worst.

Gradually Susan returned the favor. She couldn't talk about the Time War or Gallifrey; not now and maybe not ever, but she told Rose about her grandfather as she first knew him—a curmudgeon of a man with long, neatly combed white hair and sparkling blue eyes—and as she met him later—a polished dandy of a man with Disney princess hair and a velvet jacket from a hospital locker (just before a costume party, apparently) in San Francisco. She tells Rose about Ian and Barbara, about going to an Earth school in the nineteen sixties, about meeting David and how the Doctor left her, kicked her out of the TARDIS practically, so that she would stay with the man she loved.

"He's always doing that," Rose said, with the air of someone who knew it well. "He sent me home once. We were trapped on this satellite two hundred thousand years in the future and there were Daleks," she paused. Susan's knuckles had gone white around the soldering iron, although her hands were still perfectly steady and her breathing even. "He tricked me into the TARDIS," the blonde woman continued after a moment. "Said he needed my help, that he had a way to fix everything—and then he locked the door and the TARDIS left. She took me home because he was okay with dying, as long as I wasn't there."

"He didn't, though. He didn't die." Susan's voice was level and she was fairly proud of herself. Unknown years of fighting the Daleks had worn the shape of hating them into her heart, like grooves in a dirt road.

Rose snorted. "Course not. I wouldn't be here if he had." Her eyes went distant and she titled her head to the side, like she was listening to something just beyond hearing. "I couldn't fly the TARDIS, but I didn't exactly have to. She's alive, and just before that she'd turned Blon the Slitheen back into an egg. She could take me back to him—if I could just make her understand. We tried to get the console open, me an' Mickey, but his car wasn't strong enough." A smile crept onto her face. "Then Mum showed up with this big yellow truck, an' she didn't even like the Doctor, not one bit. Second time she met him, after he brought me back home a year late, she slapped him and she was always after me to leave him, to come home where it was safe—but she knew I couldn't. I couldn't just sit there and eat chips and watch the telly and live a 'normal' life, not when I knew he was fighting and dying for us. We opened the console…" Rose's voice trailed off and she frowned. "There was light, an' this singing…and then I was on the floor of the TARDIS and he was babbling on about the planet Barcelona and dogs with no noses." She looked away, and worried her bottom lip with her teeth. "And then he regenerated."

Susan stared at Rose. "You _opened_ the console of a _TARDIS_?" she asked incredulously. "Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? You were exposed to the _Time Vortex_—not even a Time Lord could survive that! It would burn right through you, like flashpaper."

"I couldn't let him die!" Rose snapped back.

"So you would die in his place?" Susan demanded.

"The universe _needs_ him! You haven't seen it, Susan. There is_ no one left, no one _but_ him_. He can't fall back on Gallifrey anymore and half the aliens we encountered didn't even know what a Time Lord was, but bad people don't stop just because he's alone!" Rose's eyes were bright and hard as she glared at the Time Lord. "I would do it again in a heartbeat, if it meant saving his life."

"Yes," Susan said softly. "I believe you would."

* * *

Susan was brilliant and Rose was a capable helper, but building a pandimensional transportation engine in the basement of a twenty-first century refugee camp (albeit a camp that was much nicer than most) was slow going. She'd give a regeneration for a sonic screwdriver. Her grandfather extolled the virtues of his pet invention for centuries and she'd always rolled her eyes and agreed with him more to keep the peace than anything—but then Susan had never been trapped in a primitive time and required to build machinery that was complex even by Gallifreyan standards.

The company, at least, was decent. Rose was surprisingly well-versed in temporal physics (for a human, anyway) and she picked up the bits she didn't already know quickly. She knew when to pull Susan out of the spiraling horror of her thoughts, and when to leave well enough alone. Familiarity pulled at Susan, like this was a pattern that Rose knew well, and she realized that the other woman had likely done the same for the Doctor. She pushed away the thought as soon as it had fully formed. It was easier to focus on the work, to remember that she promised to bring Rose home than to consider what she would do when they got there.

_If_ they got there. The machine was very nearly complete. It lacked, in fact, only one part—but without a temporal stabilizer it was just a pile of wires and pretty lights. The temporal stabilizer would allow them to travel through the Vortex without a capsule and make sure that they could phase into the same time as their surroundings. Without one they would be adrift, out of sync with the world and at the mercy of whatever time stream they happened to inhabit at the moment. It was an ugly, painful, drawn-out way to die.

She'd known for some time that the temporal stabilizer she'd ripped from the TARDIS was broken beyond repair, but she couldn't find the strength to tell Rose that they were stranded here—for good. It was far too early for human beings to have time travel—actually, in this universe they might never develop the ability. Perhaps there would be no Time Agency with its morally dubious, sex-crazed agents. Even if the agency still existed, there was no guaranteed way to attract a Time Agent, or any assurance that said agent's vortex manipulator would have a temporal stabilizer suitable for their needs.

There was nothing for it. Rose needed to know. She _deserved_ to know, and it was a good life she was building. Still—the words crawled back down Susan's throat when the young woman in question entered the workshop.

"Have you ever been to New Earth?" Rose asked as she dropped neatly to sit across from Susan. "They've got Apple grass—it's fantastic. The Doctor an' I went once, but we got stuck saving some clone-people from these nurse-cat-nun things." A wistful smile curved her lips and guilt gnawed at Susan. "I always wanted to see a show on broadway, suppose 'new' broadway will do. I'll make him take us when we get back…"

It was too much. "We can't," Susan blurted out, her eyes squeezed tightly shut to keep out the way disappointment would kill the light in Rose's eyes. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but the temporal stabilizer is fried and without that it's no use and I tried to fix it, I really did, but this is a _completely_ primitive time and my tools are less than ideal and I can't even explain how a stabilizer would work in terms you would understand let alone _build_ one with the materials at hand. So. I'm sorry—but it's not going to work."

Rose blinked. "Temporal stabilizer," she repeated, like she was tasting the words. "Is that important, then?"

"We'll die without it," Susan replied. "It lets us phase back into reality, keeps us anchored in one time stream." She shuddered. "Shifting without it is suicide."

A beatific smile spread across Rose's face: fine lines crinkled at the corners of eyes that fairly glowed with a wealth of emotion—none of which was despair or resignation or hopelessness. Susan frowned. "I don't think you understand, Rose. Without a temporal stabilizer we're stuck here. Forever."

"Why didn't you say so in the first place?" she asked.

"Hope is a powerful thing." Susan studied her for a moment, more confused than she had been in a very long time. "I couldn't crush that."

Rose stood and held out her hand to help Susan up. "Come with me," she said. "There's something you need to see."

* * *

Rose led Susan through the twisting cement corridors of Torchwood three, down numerous flights of stairs, past more surveillance equipment than the Time Lord had seen in one place on a human-dominated planet in a very long time, to a very ordinary-looking door. She pressed a succession of buttons on the unlabeled keypad next to the door (red-green-blue-blue-yellow-red-orange-black) and a soft 'click' echoed through the empty hall. Beyond the door was a small room with cubbies set into the wall, like lockers in a train station. A tall, wiry man with salt-and-pepper hair and a short, graying beard lounged in the only chair. A shotgun lay across his lap and he held a book in long, elegant hands. His clothes were utilitarian and dark and marked him out as a former Torchwood agent. Bright, intelligent blue eyes studied them for a brief moment and then a smile brought out the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

"Hello Jerry," Rose said. She was also smiling.

"Rose." His voice was pleasant and warm and a slight Ulster accent blurred the edges of his words.

She nodded at his book. "What are you reading?"

He smiled again. "Yeats. I finished the Dickens you leant me. It was good—but there's something about Yeats."

"Jerry's our resident poet," Rose told Susan with a bit of fond exasperation, "but he's fixated on William Butler Yeats. I think he's got a bit of a crush."

"He was a brilliant poet," Susan pointed out. "And quite prolific."

"Are you familiar with his work?" Jerry leaned forward and closed the book.

Susan shrugged. "A bit."

"He knew people," Jerry continued, and stroked the book's cover much like her grandfather stroked the TARDIS. He was speaking to Susan but his eyes were on Rose as she ran a hand over the lockers set into the wall. "How many loved your moments of glad grace," he murmured, "and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face."

Rose turned back to them and placed a gentle hand on Jerry's shoulder. "Two years," he continued, apropos of nothing. "Last week."

She nodded. "I know." There was warmth and understanding and a deep-seated, radiating compassion in her eyes and the slight curve of her smile. But she was like that with everyone. Susan understood, finally, why her grandfather would be drawn to this woman after the horror of the Time War: despite everything that had happened to her she still found the strength to love, and to love everyone; compassion, after all, was just love applied to the rest of the universe. She knew loss, and grief, but instead of letting it crush her or pull her down into despair she persevered. It was so very human, the idea that life would _have_ to get better. The universe owed them nothing, after all, and Susan knew it well.

Jerry covered Rose's hand on his shoulder with one of his own, and the look he gave her was decidedly more personal and not platonic, at all. How could Rose miss the way his eyes softened when he looked at her, or way he was focused on her, only her? Hell, he even quoted poetry in her general direction! Rassilon knew how, but Rose was oblivious. Was she that bad when she traveled with the Doctor? Was it possible?

Rose gave Jerry's shoulder a light squeeze and then let her hand fall. "I need the cannon out," she said softly.

He started. "What? But you said…"

"I did." She nodded. "But times have changed. Susan," she gestured to the other woman, "can get me home, back to my proper universe. But we need the cannon."

Jerry stared at her, his eyes veiled, his expression unreadable. "Mickey said," he murmured, mostly to himself, just loud enough so they could hear. "He said you were leaving, but I didn't believe him. Rose Tyler leave Torchwood? That would be the day…"

"I don't belong here." The smile was gone from her face, replaced by determination and just a hint of regret. "You know that, Jerry. You know I've been trying to get back."

"So you'll just leave us here?" he demanded. The hand resting on the shot gun's barrel was white at the knuckles and there was a wildness in his eyes and in the way he gestured with his other hand that Susan did not like at all. "You _built_ this place! You hold it all together! Every single person here depends on you, Rose, and you're just going to _abandon_ us? How long before the kids start starving, d'you think?"

"Stop it!" Rose's hands had curled into fists and Susan concentrated on being unremarkable. "You don't need me—you never have. Mickey can run this place just as well, if not better, than I can. An' Jerry—I'm going _home_."

He stared at her like she was a puzzle he couldn't figure out. And then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of keys strung on a large metal circle, and dropped them on the floor. The chair creaked as he stood and stalked off without a word.

Rose remained where she was until the echo of his footsteps faded from the hallway. She bent down and retrieved the keys from the floor. "He's just—distraught," she said to the lockers lining the walls. "His wife died two years ago last week, and his son died a few years before that. He'll come around."

Susan didn't reply, but then she didn't need to.

* * *

The Cannon, as Rose called it, was rather like a Vortex Manipulator that had been taken apart and put back together by a blindfolded genius stranded in the stone age—with chewing gum and bits of string. It was incredibly improbable and, Susan had to admit, completely brilliant at the same time, as if its creator hadn't known that the task at hand was impossible, and so it wasn't.

"It doesn't work," Rose said as she laid the device on one of the long tables in the workshop. "Not yet. Tosh took it as far as she could, but temporal mechanics is difficult to understand when you don't have the language to describe it." She tucked a stray lock of blonde hair back behind her ear and glanced up at Susan. "Well?"

"How?" Susan asked. "I mean—he told you it was impossible. The walls had closed so tightly that sending a _hologram_ took the power of a _supernova_."

Rose shrugged. "I got tired of waiting, and after everything I've seen, everything I've done—impossible is just a word, Susan. The Daleks were impossible, but they came back, the werewolf was impossible but that didn't stop it from nearly having me for dinner. Travel to parallel worlds was impossible, but we ended up here when Lumic decided to make the Cybermen. So." She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. "Can you make it work?"

Susan ran a hand over the Cannon's smooth metal casing. A smile bloomed into a full-blown grin and then Rose was smiling back and something like joy was unfolding in Susan's chest, just beneath her hearts. "Yeah," she said softly. "I can make it work."

* * *

Adapting the Cannon into the Device (as Susan had begun to call it, capital 'D' included) took two days, most of which was Susan attempting to understand exactly how the Cannon was supposed to work. Gallifreyans were temporally sensitive and possessed an inherent understanding and interpretation of time that humans lacked. It was something Susan tried to explain to Rose frequently, but she could never get it quite right. Eventually—after three false starts and one rather epic swearing fit—the Cannon was installed and took the place of the missing temporal stabilizer.

Rose said her goodbyes as Susan triple-checked the Device. Mickey was there, and Tosh and Gwen and her husband Rhys and Dr. Owen Harper, head of Medicine, and nearly every one of the camp's occupants. It was true—she held them together, kept them going when it looked like their world was ending. But there were good people here and they would keep her legacy going.

Jerry was noticeably absent. Rose shot a questioning glance in Mickey's direction, but he simply shook his head. Her lips pulled into a thin line for a moment, but when Gwen's daughter Anwen grabbed her hand Rose smoothed her irritation away and smiled for the little girl. After several more tearful hugs and a moderately moving speech Rose disentangled herself from the crowd and joined Susan in the workshop.

"This is just a test," the Time Lord cautioned. "I'm ninety-nine, well, maybe ninety-eight and three quarters, percent sure it'll work, but just—just remember that it might not."

"It might, though." Rose's voice was soft and her face pensive. "That's what kept me going, all those years stuck here. It might not work, yeah, but then again—it might."

Susan straightened and picked up the Device. It had two thick metal handles, one at each end, and a swirling mass of wires and blinky lights between them. Nestled in the center was a tiny metal box with several shavings from Rose's TARDIS key. There was a synecdoche about Gallifreyan technology, Susan explained. In extreme cases a piece could act as the whole and Rose's key was tied to the TARDIS in such a way that, with at least a little bit of the key, they could track the TARDIS itself—possibly materialize inside if everything went according to plan. The likelihood of that happening was less than one percent, in Susan's experience, but some of Rose's optimism was bleeding into her. They were going to test the Device with a short jump in time (five minutes into the future) and space (just outside the footprint of the camp). Rose grabbed the proffered handle and Susan's hand hovered over the large, red button that would start their journey.

A siren blared and the red emergency lights flashed. Shouts echoed from the corridor and beneath the tumult something changed in the steady hum of the rift converters. A high-pitched whine was building in the back of Susan's skull and Rose dropped her end of the Device. Susan opened her mouth to ask what the hell was happening, but the blonde woman was already out the door and sprinting down the corridor. Susan followed, her superior Time Lord physiology allowing her to catch up to Rose in short order. The hallways were strangely clear, but then it wouldn't do to have them clogged with panicking people during an emergency.

They were halfway to the rift converters when the radio at Rose's hip crackled to life.

"Rose!" It was Mickey. "Come in Rose, do you read?"

She skidded to a halt and yanked the walkie off her belt, bringing it to her lips in one smooth movement. "I copy. What the hell is going on?"

Mickey's voice was grim. "It's the rift converters. They've been sabotaged."

Susan grabbed the walkie away from Rose. "Mickey, talk to me. There should be a readout on the bottom left corner of the display, underneath the row of green and blue buttons. What does it say?" He read it off to her, and she swore.

"What?" Rose demanded.

"Someone started them on an overload cycle," Susan replied. She stared at the wall like she could melt a hole in it with her eyes. "Mickey, press blue-red-green-green-blue and then tell me what the readout says."

He did so. Susan swore again.

Rose grabbed her arm. "What is _happening_?"

"It's deadlocked." Susan's mouth had gone dry. Her eyes flickered back and forth but her mind was startlingly empty. "I could break the seal, _maybe_, if I had an hour and a sonic screwdriver, but now—now there's no way."

"Slow down," Rose ordered, "and start from the beginning."

Susan took a deep breath. "You know what a deadlock seal is." Rose nodded. "Someone, someone who is _very_ clever, managed to activate the deadlock seal on the rift converters. I put it in myself—great way to make sure no one would tamper with my work, but this very clever person also overrode the fail safes I had in place. The converters are absorbing more energy from the Rift than they can handle, like when a lightning bolt hits a powerline and fries your motherboard. Only—when the converters overload it'll be a bit more dramatic than some melted plastic."

"How much more dramatic?" Rose asked. Her voice was dreadfully quiet amidst the noise but Susan heard her clearly.

"It'll blow this place to pieces." Susan's hands clenched into fists. "And we can't stop it. Not you, not me, not Mickey. _This is going to happen_, Rose, and I can't fix it."

The blonde woman's eyes had gone wide and her face was pale in the dull red glare of the emergency lights. "They're going to die," she said dully. "Everyone here—they're going to die."

"_Rose_." The intercom shrieked and crackled for a moment over the sirens.

If possible, Rose paled further. It was Jerry's voice, his distinctive accent. Her eyes darted down the corridor, and landed on one of the intercom panels set into the wall. She darted to it, slammed her hand down on the button. "Yeah, Jerry," she said, panting slightly. "You've gotten my attention, now _turn this thing off_."

"_I can't do that Rose. You're leaving us—you don't care anymore, and I can't blame you. There's nothing left here, just ice and the corpse of a city. We're going to die one way or another—this is faster. Nearly instantaneous, very nearly painless._"

Shock and horror warred for expression on Rose's face. "No, Jerry!" she shouted into the machine. "It's not hopeless! The rift converters power the hydroponics lab and the ice won't be here forever. Please!" she begged. "What would Eva say if she saw you like this?"

"_Her death was a mercy, and so is this._"

"Rose!" Mickey's voice blared from the walkie. "Leave him, Rose. Take that thing you an' Susan have worked on, and go."

Rose shook her head, and then realized that Mickey couldn't see her. "M not leaving you," she rasped into the walkie. "I'm not."

"Yes," he disagreed. "You are."

The floor shook and the whine in Susan's skull threatened to split it clean open. She grabbed one of Rose's hands, wrapped it around the second handle of the Device, and pushed the red button.

It was cold and blackness so absolute that Susan thought she might never be warm again, that for a moment she was sure she existed not as a physical being, but a strand of consciousness caught between living and dying. And then the world materialized around them: cold and white and the air thick with dust and a huge crater just beyond them, where the camp had been only moments ago. Rose's hand slid limply from the handle as she stared at the blackened hole. It was filled with debris, and there was nothing recognizably human in the wreckage (Susan was grateful for this).

"He was my best friend, Mickey." Rose spoke slowly. Her voice was strangely flat, devoid of any inflection, any hint of what she was feeling. "Since we were kids. An' Gwen—she was a PC before this happened, married Rhys eight years ago. Anwen was six, seven in three months. Tosh was gonna ask Owen back to her room for a movie; she's been pining after him for years, finally got up the courage to ask him."

"I'm sorry," Susan said softly. It wasn't enough, wasn't even _close_ to enough, but it was all she had.

"_Two hundred and fifty-eight people_," Rose murmured. Her hands opened and closed reflexively. "Most of them were kids. How—how could he _do_ it?"

"Greif does strange things to people," Susan replied. "I think it drove him a little mad."

Rose closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then she turned away from the destruction. "Come on." She grabbed the end of the Device. "There's nothing left for me here—not anymore."

Susan's fingers flickered over the keypad as she input the coordinates for (hopefully) their original universe. "Are you sure?" she asked.

A muscle in Rose's jaw twitched. "Just do it."

Susan hit the red button, and then the world dissolved into blackness.


End file.
